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There has been explosive growth in the SEM business these days.  We went from a handful of businesses to thousands in the span of 3 or 4 years.

The thing is, most of these guys throw up a shingle and call themselves SEM professionals without any real experience.

In this article I explore some of the things you need to realize if you want to start your own SEM business.

First off, let’s start with the name.  Many in our industry refer to PPC when they say SEM.  Personally I prefer to think of Search Engine Marketing as a combination of a paid campaign and effective Search Engine Optimization.

Therefore, it makes sense that the broader term – Search Engine Marketing cover both disciplines.

Now, that you know the proper term let’s look at what else you need to know:

Step 1 – Learn the trade

I know this should be common sense, but I’ve seen too many clients come to me who say “I hired a guy who said he knew SEO and all he did was stick in meta tags.”

And this is common – too often a web designer or even an “SEO expert” picks up a book and, upon completing it, declares himself an expert.

In my experience this isn’t the case.  Where I work we have a 6 month training program.  New consultants aren’t unleashed on a client on their own until they’ve successfully completed the program.

And really, the book trained SEO expert causes more problems for our industry as they DON’T really know the finer details of SEO.

It’s like when I took my MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) certification.  I worked my butt off taking courses and practicing and studying to achieve this designation.  Yet in the five years I’ve had it I’ve watched people who bought a brain dump, studied that for a couple days and passed the tests to achieve the same designation as I have.

However if you ask them to accomplish many of the same tasks they simply can not because they don’t have the hands on experience that I have.

The same goes for SEO.  I went through my company’s training program and have been doing SEO for 5 years now. I consider myself a professional because I can answer any question you ask.

Further, I can take the SEO tactics and apply them within a broader SEM campaign.  I am able to marry SEO with PPC to develop a truly comprehensive SEM campaign.  Not too many people in the industry can do this.

Practice, Practice, Practice

The best way to learn the industry is to experience it – both the ups and downs.  You need to be able to feel rewarded when you can see a site rise to the top of the rankings.

Similarly, you need to be able to troubleshoot when a site disappears from the rankings, or even has technical issues.  Remember, people hire you for your experience.  If you can’t help them determine why their site is physically missing, then you are in the wrong business.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve experienced situations where the client phones frantically looking for a website that’s now generating a 404 error.  Yet the host doesn’t want to help.  Many times I can diagnose the problem remotely and provide instructions to the client to go to the host with, or sometimes it’s a simple issue that can be solved at the site level.

Whatever the case, it is this type of practical experience that book learning won’t give you.  That is why you need to practice.

Build yourself a site – even if it’s a site to sell your SEM service, then optimize it, submit to directories, write articles and so on.  Anything you would recommend to your clients you have to be able to do and to properly.

With Practice comes Knowledge and Experience

When you are comfortable with your own sites you can branch out and do others.  Now is a good time to really get your feet wet and experience other hosting and site architecture issues.

For example, an ASP based site will function differently than a PHP site.  Even sites hosted on Apache have different characteristics than those hosted on other platforms like Windows and IIS.

Therefore it’s a good idea to become familiar with as many different platforms and languages as you can.  Granted you can’t do it all at once, so I’d suggest learning the most common dynamic languages first – ASP and PHP – after you’re comfortable with HTML.

And you don’t need to be an expert in any of the languages, just have enough knowledge to understand what to look for .  This can help your troubleshoot problems for your client earning you valuable brownie points.

With Knowledge comes Power

I would think that if you do know how to properly optimize a page, your site should begin showing up in various search engines and directories now, and the leads could start trickling in.  Now it’s time to switch from your SEO hat to your sales hat.

You have to remember that most people who contact you don’t know much if anything about SEM.  They are relying on you to guide them through these murky waters.

Therefore you must talk at their level.  Don’t be afraid to throw your knowledge around but make sure they understand what you are saying.

Remember, they don’t know who you are either so right now is a good time to start establishing your SEM reputation.  Give them a few “freebies” to show them you know what your talking about (“I noticed you have the same title tag on all pages, this isn’t the best situation for SEO, yadda yadda yadda”).

Pricing can Make or Break the Deal

This is often a tricky subject – what to charge your new customers.

So you know, pricing is up to you.  Some firms charge hourly, some charge by project or deliverable while others charge based on sales or leads (a commission structure). By far the easiest is the hourly rate, however you need to be able to back up your billing by showing what your spending time on.

For things like link building you should be upfront with them.  Tell them link building is time consuming.  That way when you spend 10 hours one month and can only show that you submitted 3 links you can justify it.

I’m not going to go into the economies of what you should charge but I’ll give you some advice – make it fair.  If you feel comfortable charging a certain rate then you’re probably ok.

And don’t be discouraged too easily.  As with any sales job you’re bound to get more “no thank you”s then “sign me up!”s.

Knowledge is Power that can go Stale

While it is true that you can learn an awful lot by doing, it’s also just as important to stay on top of the industry.  See what other people are doing and why and see what’s working and what isn’t.  Forums, blogs and other online communities are great sources of information to help keep your skill set up to date.

One warning however, don’t trust everything you read or hear.  While in most cases the forums and blogs are invaluable sources, you have to weigh the comments being made with your experience and intuition.

In many cases people are making bold statements based on observations from one or a handful of sites.  If you use this information it could come back to haunt you by having sites penalized or blacklisted.

Therefore you need to ensure you have a consensus on acceptable tactics before you start applying them or making changes.

If you follow these rules and apply some common sense you too can earn a living in SEM.  Just remember that it’s a super competitive industry right now and that you won’t win every contract you pitch to. 

But if you are steadfast and willing to invest your time you can be successful.

More resources for those starting an SEO business:

Starting an SEO business

What’s The Best Way To Price SEO?

Google Information for Webmasters

Search Engine Watch forums

Webmaster World

Cre8asite Forums

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com